Section: New Software and Platforms

UsTk

Ultrasound toolkit for medical robotics applications guided from ultrasound images

Keywords: Echographic imagery - Image reconstruction - Medical robotics - Visual tracking - Visual servoing (VS) - Needle insertion

Functional Description: UsTK, standing for Ultrasound Toolkit, is a cross-platform extension of ViSP software dedicated to two- (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound image processing and visual servoing based on ultrasound images. Written in C++, UsTK architecture provides a core module that implements all the data structures at the heart of UsTK, a grabber module that allows to acquire ultrasound images from an Ultrasonix or a Sonosite device, a GUI module to display data, an IO module for providing functionalities to read/write data from a storage device, and a set of image processing modules to compute the confidence map of ultrasound images, generate elastography images, track a flexible needle in sequences of 2D and 3D ultrasound images and track a target image template in sequences of 2D ultrasound images. All these modules were implemented on several robotic demonstrators to control the motion of an ultrasound probe or a flexible needle by ultrasound visual servoing.

• Participants: Alexandre Krupa, Marc Pouliquen, Fabien Spindler and Pierre Chatelain

• Partners: Inria - Université de Rennes 1

• Contact: Alexandre Krupa

• URL: https://ustk.inria.fr